Page 194 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

REMEDIATING WRITING ASSESSMENT 161

assessment. This is how the field can move toward a language that
accommodates coherence in electronic text assessment.
What these newer electronic writing assessment genres suggest is
that in convergence, writing assessment has to account for the types
of transparency that occur when writing is publicly situated. Part of
the new accountability in electronic writing assessment has to re-
flect the social and technical aspects as well as the aesthetic elements
required for readers to appreciate the e-text before us. Consequently,
a remediated form of writing assessment depends on a sense of im-
mediacy that permits the rubric to "disappear." That is, the context
for assessment is seamless from the process. In many ways, Bob
Broad's Dynamic Criteria Mapping system (2003) opens the way for
immediacy to occur in computer-focused writing assessment. In-
stead of rigidly following sets of descriptors made for paper texts,
writing teachers can begin to account for the multiplicity of media
and the students' facility with such media that exist to create e-texts;
it is this context of how the writer selects and uses the appropriate
media that frequently determines whether an electronic text is well
received. The context and the media also allow instructors to observe
changes in the student as author, how he or she responds rhetori-
cally to these new contexts and media, the aesthetic determinations a
writer must make, the growth in agency and ethos, and the
development of parts to whole.
In a remediated understanding of writing assessment, composit-
ionists must come to recognize that in an e-text various media si-
multaneously "honor, acknowledge, appropriate, and implicitly or
explicitly attack one another" (Bolter & Grusin, 2002, p. 87).
Therefore, writers have to adopt differing strategies to accommo-
date changes in the media. Assessment then emerges as an ongoing
way to sanction or discourage specific strategies in context—
through either academic, political, economic, or cultural forces—
regarding the decisions a writer makes. Still, serious questions re-
main regarding how, or if, standards can be maintained in writing
instruction given a remediated form of writing assessment
through converged technologies.

REMEDIATION AND THE QUESTION OF STANDARDS

Few writing instructors have to go far before hearing some com-
plaint about the current state of students' writing: E-mails from